On Panetta as CIA Director

TPM is all over the designation by the Obama transition team of Leon Panetta as CIA Director. It is surprising. He is NOT an intelligence professional. However, he is well known as a guy who gets things done, having been Bill Clinton's White House Chief of Staff after being a successful California congressman.

The choice came out of left field to almost everyone. Interestingly, the incoming Senate Intel Committee Chairwoman, Diane Feinstein, and the outgoing SSCI Chairman, Jay Rockefeller, both stated that they had not been informed of Panetta's selection. Feinstein has hinted that she might oppose Panetta for the CIA job. This failure to contact the current and prior chairs of the Senate Intel Committee has led to speculation that the Obama transition team made a uncharacteristic protocol error.

However, the Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden, a less senior member of the committee, states that he WAS informed of the selection in advance. This strongly suggests that not informing Feinstein and Rockerfeller in advance was not a simple oversight. If not, then what could have motivated the transition team to skip a simple phone call?

Don't you just love inside politics?

A retired Intelligence professional took the time to write Josh Marshall an email that gave his opinion of what is going on. Josh published it here. His opinion is that Feinstein did not want the CIA Director to be someone who had his own wide network of independent power base of political supporters as Panetta clearly does. She would have a great deal of control over an intel professional who had risen to become CIA Director, but a lot less control over someone with broad outside support like Panetta. This would explain both the failure to call her and her sour comments on his designation as Obama's choice.

The emailer goes on to state that the big issue for the incoming CIA Director was going to be whether the CIA was focused on providing immediate tactical intelligence to the troops on the ground, or if it was going to be refocused to provide strategic intelligence to the President as the agency was originally designed to do. In the last decade and a half many agencies in the Intelligence Community have greatly expanded their ability to provide tactical intelligence, but the funds at CIA have been prioritized to support that effort, leaving strategic Intel for the President lacking.

There is also the issue that with General Jones as National Security Advisor and Blair as Director of National Intelligence, the entire Intelligence Community is being focused on the Military. He calls it "the [continuing] militarization of intelligence." Panetta will bring a civilian orientation in at the top.

I find the emailer's comments rather persuasive. The ex-White House Chief of Staff was certainly in a position to know what Intelligence the President needed and at the same time what he was getting. If that's the direction the CIA is to be reoriented towards, Panetta is an inspired choice. It doesn't appear that the CIA has yet fully broken the blinders of being totally focused on the USSR, and now America's problems are found in many other parts of the world.

The CIA has suffered a lot of blame for what the Bush administration has done, and its reputation is definitely down at this time. (While I don't think the CIA was blameless, an awful lot was the Bush administration blaming the CIA for Bush's failure to manage the government well.) Panetta's appointment, with his broad political base, should also help the agency to recover a lot of its reputation.

Still, the Panetta hearings in the Senate are going to be interesting.

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Addendum 11:04 am -- Just a thought.

Rockefeller is leaving the SSCI. Why is he upset about the proposed appointment of Panetta to the CIA? He's not losing any power.

My first reaction is that Rockefeller got the nickname of "Jello Jay" for so frequently caving to the right wing on important issues. What if Panetta surfaces evidence that Rockefeller was in the Administration's pocket and was directly responsible for encouraging, permitting or approving war crimes? With an intel professional with no outside-the-agency base of power as Director, Diane Feinstein could rather easily cover up such problems for Rockefeller. As the Senate Democrat's treatment of Joe Lieberman shows, the Senate Democrats do that a lot. She'll have a lot less such control over Panetta.

Or Panetta may just want to cut or redirect some of Rockefeller's pet programs, and again will be less subject to control.

With Panetta in that office it might just come out why Rockefeller so rarely supported Democratic positions when he was Chairman or Ranking Member. That has always been a puzzle.